There's a very nice lady in Texas that I bought some cheaper Johnsonii bulbs a few years back. She has a "plantation" of them in her garden. LOL They were true Johnsoniis when they bloomed but when I planted them outside in my garden which is a zone 6/7, they did not survive. I'll try to search her email.

If you want other hardy amaryllis, and are willing to wait a year or two for plants to reach a flowering size, Wellspring Gardens sells H. ackermannii and Voodoo for $5 each. I recently ordered these and they were small potted plants, which, I was told, were produced by tissue culture. The bulbs were about the size of a large grape, so I will have wait a while. They were packaged very well with the leaves arriving intact.

Macrolemys , thanks for the information . I am always looking for 'hardy ones' . I ordered a Voodoo bulb on ebay UK recently for this purpose , I will plant it outdoors in late spring. I have another hippeastrum bought as H X acramanii , the name is almost the same , but my flowers are very different :

Dear colleagues, experts, I have a question for you - what is the real Hippeastrum Johnsonii?
Because even bulbsociety.org have two pictures and they are different. However, one - it's an old picture, but it's another photo. The first has an almost tubular flower petals ruffled and center petals short white stripes.
The second flower is wide open, without corrugation and strips almost reach the tips of the petals.
The question is, which of these is the real Johnsonii?

I usually see johnsonii as the tubular form similar to the photo that Maria posted. I have attached the link to a relevant discussion of it on this forum. My conclusion from it is that many of the plants considered to be johnsonii are self fertile, and produces seedlings similar to the parent, so it is difficult to know if a plant is truly a clone of the original hybrid produced nearly 200 years ago. I find H. ackermannii to be even more confusing. There are alternate spellings, and some photos show it as all red while others as a red flower with white stripe. If anyone has insight into this cultivar, I am interested to learn more.

"They were true Johnsoniis when they bloomed but when I planted them outside in my garden which is a zone 6/7, they did not survive. I'll try to search her email."

That's curious, if you are really in zn 7 according to the new map. I've grown H. X johnsonii outdoors in the environs of DC & Baltimore since the late 90s and they've always been hardy. Although in the past few years I've had trouble getting them to bloom because I have a limited number of spots with the absolute 100% sun exposure it seems to require up here.

Yes I was quite disappointed when the johnsonii bulbs I planted did not make it. They leafed out spring/summer but did not come back the next spring. I dug them up and they were rotten. Perhaps it's the clayish soil with lots of rocks we have here in this part of Virginia (southwestern part). I live by the mountains with 1,407 ft of elevation. I do have a south wall but would now really rather plant other plants that are truly hardy here and don't require me to amend my soil. My back is getting too old for this. LOL

If johnsonii really survives in Baltimore/DC area, then I could purchase some bulbs of it and send to my brother in Balto to plant in their garden. My sis-in-law would be ecstatic!

As for other hardy cultivars, Apple blossom is hardy here in Raleigh NC (7b). Plant Delights Nursery has a large area dedicated to field trials of various plants and has found Charisma, San Antonio Rose, Voodoo, and Wedding Dance to do well here (in addition to johnsonii and ackermannii). They mention on their web page that Wedding Dance even survived to -1 F (-18 C). Of these varieties, it appears that only Charisma and Wedding dance are easily found for sale as forced bulbs.
If anyone has information on other varieties that are known to be relatively hardy, I would like to hear about them.

I have 3 Apple Blossom amaryllis, 1 is planted in the yard and the others are indoors. I planted Red Lion and Minerva outside to as an experiment. I have a Vittatum hybrid that's supposed to be cold hardy. It hasn't bloomed in 2 or 3 years now. I managed to find some old pics of it. It has a light fragrance as well.

I don't mean to change the subject but while we're on the theme of huge numbers of the same bulbs growing down south (in this case Florida) I am wondering if this too could be a species and if not why are are vast amounts of these bulbs identical.

Two years in a row I bought these bulbs from EBay and there is also another seller who is currently selling them and calls them an heirloom. Since I originally bought from the Florida location and the bulbs were super healthy with no virus if I were to buy again I would buy from her but I'm sure the other seller's bulbs would be fine also.

As you can see these clump up like crazy as the H. Jonsonii do and I'm quite sure these are all from offsets. I tried to self and do a few crosses on mine last year with no positive results.
But of course one try does mean that they won't self.

This is the seller's pictures used for the listing of these bulbs.

The bulbs can be gigantic

Does the term heirloom mean that they will always reproduce identically from seed as a species does?

Hi Donna,
I don't think that this is necessarily true about heirloom varieties if they have been passed along from cuttings or offsets, but should be true for heirlooms that are repeatedly propagated by seed. Suppose you did the following experiment: (1) self-pollinate any self-fertile hybrid, (2) choose one offspring and grow it until it flowers (3) self-pollinate that plant, (4) repeat that for a few generations. As you do this, you will get plants that progressively look more and more like the previous generation, but they will not necessarily look like the original hybrid. Also each time you repeat this experiment with a new seed from very first parent, the end result should be somewhat different. These lines of inbred plants are referred to as recombinant inbred lines. Passing along heirlooms should act in much the same way. I get a bulb from a friend, and it gets selfed because there are no other plants with which to cross. Some seedlings establish in my garden, and I give one to another friend, etc. Also, you can get similar results by performing crosses within a small group of plants over multiple generations, as long as no new plants or pollen are introduced into the population. So even if you are not strict in only growing a single seedling from the previous generation, you will eventually get plants that are reproduce true from seed.

Oleg : my version of acramanii is said to be a cross between aulicum and psittacinum , I grow it since many years , certainly due to aulicum parentage it flowers in summer and sometimes autumn. the fower are up faced. As it is said to be relatiley hardy I planted some in the garden last summer to test.

Donna , when I discovered your post about this heirloom bulb last year, as you added a link, I bought some bulbs to the same seller too , and she offered me some extra seeds from self pollinisation so it is possible. I have to thank you, it is a very interesting variety.The young bulbs are very vigourous and grow fast. I also planted one of those bulbs outside for testing. It is still all right but we haven't got very frost temperatures for the moment.

Macro : I grow a very hardy one for more than 10 years , but I got it as a mislabelled , it should be a very common one, maybe it is Faro ? Needs confirmation.

Also Baby Star is said to be very hardy , but I never can find the real variety , each time I order one, I get a Lily Star instead.

I am wondering too if the clumper varieties could be hardy , they are so easy to grow, multiplying fast... So I am trying a Lovely Garden in the garden since this winter , and I bought a White Garden for the same purpose.

Very interesting discussion of "heirloom". I suppose I use it to mean reliable passalong whose parentage is lost to time. But maybe that is an incorrect usage?

That's a gorgeous picture Donna. It isn't unusual to see big rows like that, especially in older neighborhoods here. My guess is they are identical because they weren't seed propagated, just many, many offsets. The growing season here is long, so offsetting rate is fast. In maybe 3 years, a single bulb can produce 10-15 offsets, and the offsets grow to full size much faster than seed grown bulb because they are getting to take advantage of nutrients from the mother bulb's foliage and root system. Here's an example. This was a single bulb 2 years ago:

I got my 'Naughty Lady' starts from a retired couple with a yard that had a row of bulbs like that. I knocked and introduced myself and asked if they'd share an offset with me. I would have been happy to have 1. They took my name and told me they'd give me a call when it was time to divide & thin after blooming finished. Their yearly thinning removes hundreds of bulbs, as their yard is at saturation. They gave me approximately 50! I was absolutely overwhelmed! So you can easily then imagine that I plant those 50 bulbs in a row and after 3 years, assuming you get maybe 10 offsets from each bulb - that's a row of 500 bulbs!

Here's my Johnsonii. I got them from Southern Bulb Co, and they seem to be true. They are fragrant, and do not set seed (have tried every variety I have), but their pollen is very good for placing on other varieties.

Thanks for the update girlfriend! Diane just asked for her infos and I just wanted to know if that email of hers still works. Hope you all get good johnsonii bulbs. I remember getting some nice ones from her before that bloomed true.

Very beautiful Maria, Japanese bulbs? Let me guess; Salmon Taenia on the left, Bonfire on the bottom and the top one I would take a guess at the correiense hybrid?? My correiense hybrid rotted and they didn't have any more so they refunded my money.